To a serious mechanical watch fan, the idea that any quartz watch might be something you’d call a value proposition – much less a quartz watch costing thousands of dollars – might seem ridiculous, but if you’re of a certain turn of mind there’s a kind of integrity and purity to be found in Seiko’s Grand Seiko quartz watches you won’t get anywhere else. Grand Seiko mechanical watches, of course, are generally considered by serious watch lovers to be one of the best things to happen to watchmaking since Huygens stuck a spiral spring on a balance, and Seiko Spring Drive is a reminder of Arthur C. Clarke’s adage that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic – but quartz?

What’s there to love about a quartz watch? Specifically, what is there to love about a two and a half thousand dollar quartz watch?

Well, as with many things, a little understanding of the basic problems the quartz Grand Seiko was designed to address can go a long way towards understanding why it’s worth taking an interest in – and, just maybe, even loving. Quartz watches are pretty simple: inside the watch is a tiny quartz crystal, shaped like a tuning fork. Quartz has an interesting property: it’s piezoelectric. That means that if you deform it physically, it’ll generate a current – conversely, if you run a current through it, you’ll make it deform (change shape).

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The nice thing about all this is that it means if you pass a current through a tuning fork shaped quartz crystal, it’ll start to vibrate. As Aaron Berlow pointed out just a short while ago in his review of the early Girard-Perregaux quartz caliber 350, the industry standard frequency for a quartz crystal has been 32,768 hertz (vibrations per second) for many years, and for a good reason: a simple process of dividing by two repeatedly gives you one second pulses (32,768 is two to the fifteenth power).

All so far and so good, but there are issues. The first is that all this requires energy, and as quartz watches in general are powered by dry cells that don’t push a ton of volts, you have to use power sparingly for things like driving the hands and switching the date. More fundamentally, quartz crystals, like any other oscillator in a timekeeper, are not perfectly stable – the purity of the crystal, its age, and most critically, the temperature, can affect rate; with respect to temperature, it’s the same problem that we see with balance springs in a mechanical watch.

Now, we tend to think of quartz movements as all, more or less, alike, but just as there are degrees of quality in mechanical movements, so there are in quartz. Most quartz movements drift by about fifteen seconds or so per month – this was when they were first sold (by Seiko, in 1969) and still is, a remarkable improvement over the general performance of mechanical wristwatch movements, but it is actually possible to substantially improve on that figure. An average, inexpensive quartz watch will only run to within 15 seconds every 30 days if it’s kept at a fairly stable temperature, but a very few quartz watches actually have temperature compensated movements and can produce dramatically better performance.

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If we look at the details of construction of the Seiko quartz caliber 9F we see a movement that is dramatically superior to an average quartz movement. First of all, if you are still preoccupied with in-house this is about as in-house as it gets; Seiko not only has its own semiconductor facilities, it also grows its own quartz crystals in giant reactors, and from the raw crystals selects only the most pure for Grand Seiko quartz movements. To avoid drift in rate due to aging, the selected crystals are aged for up to three months. Each crystal is individually tested for its specific frequency response to temperature change, and paired with an integrated circuit specifically programmed for that crystal. Once inside the watch, the movement actually samples the ambient temperature 540 times a day, and uses that information to adjust the frequency of the crystal to compensate.

The movement is also unusually mechanically sophisticated – one neat feature is the presence of a minute spiral spring (it looks identical to a balance spring, as a matter of fact) which is fixed to the pivot of the seconds hand and whose role is to take up what watchmakers call “backlash” in the gears driving the hand. Backlash just means the tiny amount of play you need in order for gears to turn when they mesh – the problem is that that small amount of play is amplified by the length of the seconds hand and can lead to visible irregularities in the positioning of the second hand relative to the dial markers; the Grand Seiko caliber 9F – more specifically, the 9F62 as shown here – has no truck with such frivolous imprecision.

The list goes on and on – there is a special high speed motor for the date change that allows it to change the date in 1/2000 of a second; special high torque stepping motors are installed, which allow the use of more substantial – and substantially more beautiful – hands than you typically see on a quartz watch. The movement is actually just plain nice to look at – there are all sorts of things you’d ordinarily associate with high end mechanical watches, like parallel Geneva stripes (let’s call them Shiojiri stripes, maybe to recognize the provenance of the movement – it’s made in Shiojiri, in Nagano Prefecture) along with train jewels (nine, count ‘em, nine) and there is even a fine regulator for adjusting the rate. The entire package is sealed to prevent entry of dust, and other than changing the dry cell, Seiko says you can expect at least 50 years before its lubricants and other mechanical parts will require attention. And the punch line to all this extra effort is a watch guaranteed to run to within, not ten or fifteen seconds per month, but only +/- 10 seconds per year.

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All this is all the more remarkable when you bear in mind that almost nobody else is bothering to do anything to improve the state of the art in quartz timekeeping anymore – Rolex’s Oysterquartz movements were wonderfully well made and very precise (they were temperature compensated, and like the Seiko caliber 9F, had a fine regulator but have long since been taken out of production). There’s Citizen’s Chronomaster, of course, but that’s an extreme rarity outside Japan and at least officially they are not available in many foreign markets. If you want a watch that has a really uncompromising approach to accuracy, has all the legendary Grand Seiko finesse and care in construction, and which is not, as radio controlled watches are, parasitic on atomic clocks sitting thousands of miles away (for the real accuracy maven, a fundamentally unsatisfying solution) then the Grand Seiko Quartz watches, and the caliber 9F represent an especially exciting, and to most intents and purposes, unique, value proposition indeed.